Shrine Maiden of the Sacred Fire

  His thoughts drifted off into a bit of a tangent, but this spurred him to ask about something that had been bothering him for a while. Haruyuki opened his mouth. “Um, Ash, why GW?”

  “Come on, why the sudden interrogation? Honestly? ’Cause in the beginning I thought it was a freaking huge Legion. And my house is over that way, too, and the kid who invited me was pretty decent. Once I joined, turns out GW’s totally way more free than Blue or Purple, so I got no regrets. Our LM doesn’t go around giving orders or making rules, either.”

  The LM—Legion Master—of Great Wall was, of course, the Green King. Haruyuki nodded in understanding, remembering the thorough reticence of Green Grandé he had caught a glimpse of at the meeting of the Seven Kings the other day. Putting aside this question, he finally got to the heart of the matter.

  “So about Bush Utan…Is he maybe your ‘child,’ Ash?”

  Apparently, this was not a question Ash Roller had expected. He yanked his skull face back before shaking his head quickly from side to side. “As if. I’m not child-having caliber yet. That kid U’s parent is…gone. Beginning of the year, lost all his points.”

  A shiver ran up Haruyuki’s spine. In his ears, Utan’s monologue from the night before roared back to life:

  You gotta be strong or it’s all meaningless. If you’re not strong, you can’t get a win ratio worth anything, and you stay at the bottom of your Legion, your points dry up, you disappear from the secret Accelerated World.

  As Haruyuki sank into silence, Ash Roller let out one deep sigh before moving abruptly and unexpectedly. Placing his right hand on the mouth area of his helmet’s skull shield, he flung his entire face to the rear with a clack.

  Ash Roller watched, bare-faced and invisible eyebrow arched, as Haruyuki threw himself back in surprise. His pale green eye lenses were fairly thin, and combined with the pointed chin of his faceplate, the structure of his helmetless head was somehow that of a science-loving boy. At the very least, the impression was one hundred eighty degrees from the usual cackling Century End rider act. From that mouth came his real voice, with an unexpectedly subtle tone.

  “…Whut?”

  “N-no, nothing!”

  “Then get back on topic. When he lost his parent, Utan was still level one. And after that…y’know, stuff happened, and I ended up looking after him. Wasn’t like I was the perfect guy for the job, but I couldn’t just leave him, right?”

  “Right. You’re a great big bro.”

  “Dunno. Maybe I never really saw the first thing about what was going on in that kid’s head. I mean, the last little while, I knew he was sorta stuck, but…I been busy with stuff, too, and I just kept putting it off. And then maybe since the day before yesterday or so, I basically hear nothing from him. He’s never on the Shibuya matching list when I connect, and he totally doesn’t answer any of my mails. Then I start hearing weird rumors.”

  “Rumors?” Haruyuki leaned forward, and Ash Roller dropped his shoulders once again.

  “I heard Utan’d teamed up with Olive Grab and was using this weird tech to win in empty areas like Setagaya and Ota,” he responded lifelessly. “So I went over that way yesterday. I never thought he’d be in Setagaya…And the truth about this ‘weird tech,’ I didn’t think it’d be something serious like that—an item you can equip that lets you use the Incarnate System. And one someone else could give you.”

  Haruyuki waited for this break to ask ever so timidly, “Ash, do you have any idea who the Burst Linker that gave Utan and the others the ISS kit might be?”

  But the helmet with the shield still up simply shook from side to side. “Can’t pin it on anyone. I could tell you the names of all the kids I know Utan hangs out with, but…Look, Crow, maybe there’s no point in figuring out who gave the thing to Utan, you know?”

  “What? That’s not true,” Haruyuki hurriedly objected. “We have to at least stop the distribution of something so dangerous!”

  Figuring out the identity of the Burst Linker who gave Utan the ISS kit was exactly the purpose of talking with Ash Roller like this in Closed mode. Even if he couldn’t immediately narrow it down to one person, if he made a list of the Burst Linkers Utan had contact with and went through it in order, there was a possibility he could take down the source of the kits.

  But Ash Roller’s next words smashed Haruyuki’s hopeful hypothesis. “That bit about how the ISS kit you saw looking like a living creature, that is totally tripping me up. I mean, in the Accelerated World, living-type equipment and items have pretty specific characteristics. Like automatically healing when it gets broken…or splitting with the passage of time. What if…what if this kit being handed out is…a copy, or a copy of a copy?”

  “Ah!” Haruyuki unconsciously cried out. He hadn’t even considered the possibility.

  The ISS kit someone had given Bush Utan. Although he had no grounds for making this assumption, he hadn’t wavered in his belief that it was a single person handing the kits out. If, like Ash Roller said, that black eyeball had the ability to duplicate itself and randomly distribute copies to other people…and then assuming there was some kind of compensation for this action…

  It might already be too late.

  While he was sitting here like this, the ISS kit was continuing its boundless expansion, the number of Burst Linkers able to use the terrifying power of a dark Incarnate attack steadily increasing. And all the while, none of them were being taught the first thing about what the Incarnate System even was. Naturally, they wouldn’t have a clue about the most basic first rule—“You must never use Incarnate unless you are attacked by Incarnate”—so they’d have a field day using it in duels. This was already essentially the collapse of the Brain Burst: strategies in line with the characteristics of the stage, techniques to take advantage of your own abilities—all these would lose their meaning, and the fights would devolve into simply trading Dark Shots at long distances and Dark Blows closer up.

  Haruyuki shivered bodily at the future’s savage portrait.

  He tried to find some basis for refuting it, but before he could, Ash Roller whispered, “The truth is…I’ve heard about two or three other cases besides Utan and Olive where someone’s suddenly started using ‘weird tech.’ And one of them apparently came out of the Edogawa Area. And now hearing this from you, it all makes me wonder if maybe there isn’t more than one place these ISS kits are coming from.”

  “What? Edogawa Ward?” he repeated, stunned. That was on the opposite side of the Imperial Palace from Utan’s base of Shibuya and Setagaya. It was too far. Unfortunately, this only strengthened the doubt that maybe instead of being distributed, they were being disseminated.

  But who’s doing it, and for what?

  Frustrated, Haruyuki chewed on the question in his mouth that had been plaguing him since the night before. Of course, absolutely no answer came to mind. He hung his head low, and he looked down on his own shadow swaying in the light of the fire in the drum, his mind starting to wander.

  Finally, Ash Roller muttered, “Even sitting here talking like this, thirty minutes is too short, eh?”

  Reflexively checking the timer in the top of his field of view, he saw that the 1,800 seconds they had started with was already down to 300. Of course, it was possible to do the duel over again from the matching list, but any more discussion than this and they’d just be putting speculation on top of speculation.

  Haruyuki bowed his head, ready to thank Ash Roller for agreeing to his sudden dialogue request and wrap things up.

  But before he could do anything else, Ash Roller lowered the skull shield of his mask with a clack. “Crow,” he said quickly in an effect-laden voice. “Before we go, I got something to talk to you about, too.”

  “Huh? What is it?”

  “Aah, ’kay…I shouldn’t be the one bringing this up, but…we got no time, so I’ll be straight. You don’t think something’s been weird in your duels this week? Other than the thing with Utan, I mean.”

  “
Huh? Weird?” He immediately scanned his memory, but there was nothing particular that caught his attention. If he counted the fights to defend his Territory three days earlier, he had fought about twenty normal duels, but the battle with Utan the day before had made such a strong impression that he couldn’t even remember how many of those he had won. Bewildered, he started talking. “No…All my duels were just regular, I think. What do you mean by ‘weird’?”

  Ash Roller hesitated oddly before replying awkwardly, “That ‘regular’ bit.”

  “R-regular is weird? Ummm. I’m sorry, I’ve been worried about a bunch of things since the race last week, and to be honest, I haven’t actually dueled that much.”

  The things he was worried about were, of course, the meeting of the Seven Kings that had taken place two days earlier, and the handling of Silver Crow as an item on the agenda there. If he didn’t purify himself within a week of the element of the Armor of Catastrophe that was believed to be parasitizing his avatar from somewhere, Haruyuki would, in light of the situation, be banished from the Accelerated World. Haruyuki might not get the chance to see with his own eyes the massive confusion the ISS kit would bring about…

  The instant his thinking got to that point, Haruyuki finally grasped what Ash Roller was trying to say to him.

  Regular was weird. Right, that was exactly it. Basically, Haruyuki shouldn’t have been in any position to be able to duel like he regularly did. Because the week before, in the Hermes’ Cord race, Silver Crow had transformed into Chrome Disaster before the eyes of more than a hundred members of the Gallery. Talk that Haruyuki was the sixth owner of the cursed armor should have raced through the Accelerated World. The real mystery was that no one was refusing to duel him or fiercely cursing him out or anything at all.

  Every Burst Linker he had dueled that week, even Bush Utan the previous day, had acted like they had no idea about Haruyuki’s transformation into Disaster. Which was basically not possible, when he thought about it rationally.

  “Right. That is weird. Every duel I’ve been in, no one’s said anything to me,” Haruyuki said hoarsely.

  Ash Roller started chattering at top speed. “But, like, the reason for that is that all those hundreds of people in the Gallery who saw that fight between you and that rusted bastard made a pact before they logged out.”

  “What? A pact? What kind of pact?” Haruyuki asked in reply, unable to comprehend this statement.

  Ash Roller’s answer was surprising. “‘We will never offer a single word of reproach to Silver Crow for equipping the Armor of Catastrophe in Hermes’ Cord.’”

  “…What…”

  “Because…you saved the race. That event the rusted bastard would have totally wrecked, at the very last of last moments, you brought it back into our hands. So for just this one transformation, we’ll all keep our mouths shut, and we won’t think about how you managed to get ahold of the Armor. Everyone in the Gallery then just said it sort of spontaneously and agreed unanimously, I guess. And that’s why in all your duels this week, no one has even said the letter D of Disaster to you.”

  “……” Deeply surprised and slammed with another, even more massive emotion than that, Haruyuki opened his eyes wide, speechless.

  Among all those people, more than a hundred, who watched the fight between Silver Crow and Rust Jigsaw, there had to have been tons who belonged to the kings’ Legions. Haruyuki should have been an enemy to them. It was only natural they would reproach and fiercely curse Haruyuki as the summoner of the detested Armor of Catastrophe. And yet, despite that…

  “Before we’re members of the different Legions, we’re Burst Linkers. That’s what it is,” Ash Roller said distinctly, staring at Haruyuki before continuing in an unprecedentedly serious voice. “Crow, that’s why right now, there’s no real hostility toward you. I heard a bit about the judgment at the meeting of the Seven Kings from some guys up top in GW, but sounds like there’re some peeps saying it’s too harsh. So now that that’s all out there, I wanna ask you…”

  The briefest of instants.

  Suddenly sensing something ominous, Haruyuki’s voice was strangled as he urged Ash Roller on. “What is it…?”

  “There’s more to the rumors I heard. This ‘weird tech’ Utan and Olive are using…I heard it’s a copy of Chrome Disaster’s power.”

  Having finished his irregular closed duel with Ash Roller, who was likely on one of the buses running along Kannana Street, Haruyuki crossed the pedestrian walkway to the south and headed for school. During the time he walked westward on Oume Kaido, and even after he slipped through the school gates, changed his shoes, and arrived at his desk, the shock and questions squatting in his brain showed no signs of going anywhere.

  The Incarnate attack from the weird tech Bush Utan used—the ISS kit—was a copy of Chrome Disaster’s attack power.

  It wasn’t possible. He’d never heard of anyone reproducing someone else’s abilities and loading them into a parasitic item. But now that he was thinking about it, he also hadn’t even heard the words parasite or purify until very recently. It wasn’t at all strange that there would be logic he still didn’t know about in the Accelerated World.

  And the black overlay of that Dark Blow and Dark Shot did look a lot like the aura of darkness that covered the Armor of Catastrophe…

  He shuddered on his hard plastic chair. Putting aside whether it was true or not, if this rumor spread far and wide as ISS kits were disseminated, the anger of Burst Linkers who loved the Accelerated World would probably become something explosive directed squarely at Haruyuki, the sixth owner of Chrome Disaster. He had no doubt that the pact the members of the Gallery in the Hermes’ Cord race had gone to the trouble of making would be undone in an instant. They might even come to believe Haruyuki had betrayed them and harbor an enormous hatred for him.

  “Why is this happening…?” Haruyuki muttered silently, listening to the bells signaling the start of the day ringing off in the distance.

  Where and when exactly had this crisis begun? He almost believed there was an invisible force somewhere, separate from the judgment of the Seven Kings, that was closing in on him. Was it simply a series of strange coincidences? Or was someone making it happen…? If it was the latter, this way of preparing scrupulously, of carefully controlling information to back him into a corner, brought a certain character sharply to mind. He had appeared before Haruyuki as a new student at Umesato that spring and tried to destroy him with devilish means: the Twilight Marauder.

  Glancing up at the ceiling—and the seventh-grade classroom beyond it—he shook his head slightly. There was absolutely no way that guy was maneuvering here again. Once someone lost all their burst points and had Brain Burst forcefully uninstalled, they lost all memories related to the Accelerated World. The day after their final battle, Haruyuki had seen this hidden rule with his own eyes when he tried to talk to the Marauder.

  But. Supposing he had learned this method of attack from someone else?

  Supposing this “teacher” had started to move finally?

  “Haru.”

  Haruyuki jumped at the pat on his right shoulder. Whirling around with incredible force, he found the familiar face of his good friend, eyes blinking rapidly behind blue glasses.

  “Taku.”

  “What’s wrong? Time to head to the next class.”

  At these words from his childhood friend and fellow Legion member, Takumu Mayuzumi, he hurriedly looked around. Apparently, morning homeroom had finished; his classmates were leaving the classroom one after another. First period on Tuesdays was Music, so they had to move to the soundproofed music room.

  “Oh…r-right.”

  Takumu watched Haruyuki jump to his feet, eyebrows knitted. “Haru,” he whispered in Haruyuki’s ear, shrugging his lanky shoulders. “If you’re worrying about the bounty thing, it’s like I said yesterday: You don’t need to make yourself sick about that. Chi and I, and Fuko, and of course Master, we’ll protect you.”

&n
bsp; “Y-yeah. Sorry. Now I’m getting you worried and all.” He managed to bring a smile to his face, and as he stood up and began to walk, Haruyuki got to thinking.

  Takumu probably hadn’t yet heard the rumor that the IS kit was a Chrome Disaster copy. But he’d find out if he did his usual dueling after school. Haruyuki should explain the whole thing before then. And not just to Takumu, but to Kuroyukihime and the other Legion members.

  Stepping out into the hallway, he nudged Takumu’s arm with his elbow and replied in a low murmur, “So, uh, once you’re done with practice today, come to my place. I got something I need to talk to you about, but we probably won’t have enough time for it at school.”

  “Got it.” Takumu nodded immediately without any awkward questions, for which Haruyuki was thankful.

  “Can you tell Chiyu for me?” he continued. “I’ll mail Kuroyukihime and Fuko.”

  “What time?”

  “Right. Uh, six thirty.”

  “Roger.”

  With this brief exchange, the chill clinging to Haruyuki’s spine finally seemed to fade a little. He clenched his hands and told himself silently, I’m not gonna lose. As if I could lose. I’ve got such solid friends. No matter what plan gets cooked up, no matter what happens, nothing can break my spirits. No way.

  However, at the terror Takumu unleashed immediately after this, Haruyuki heard the distinct sound of something snapping in his heart.

  “That reminds me, Haru. We’re supposed to be presenting our vocal solo assignments in music class next. Did you practice?”

  8

  After school.

  In addition to first period’s vocal solo presentations, Haruyuki was forced to play softball, his absolute worst sport, during fifth-period gym class. The day had done serious physical and mental damage to him by the time Haruyuki staggered, exhausted, out to the animal hutch in the yard.

  Because the cleaning of the hutch was finished, the only duty in that day’s journal file was something the club president, Haruyuki, would do alone. A tiny part of him expected words of passionate appreciation and gratitude from his colleagues, Hamajima and Izeki, who he had sent home early the day before, but what he got when he stepped through the entrance earlier were just the briefest of messages: “You worked hard, Prez” and “Yup.”